The death of Apple front man Steve Jobs spawned a wave of iWakes across the world, but the loss of Dennis Ritchie – the father of the C programming language and unix, was just as sad a day for techies everywhere. Perhaps even worse – as many people didn’t even notice.

Afterall, OSX could not exist without the work that Ritchie did 30 years ago.

To pay respect to the digital pioneer, our very own Sean Davis wrote a C program to send a cheers to the big bit bucket in the sky.

I once heard someone say that doing a major network upgrade on a live production network is not unlike performing open heart surgery on someone – while they are running a marathon. In the world of The Internet, one bad keystroke can be as dangerous as an unanticipated slip of the scalpel.

Over the past 8 months, the Serverbeach network has undergone a series of upgrades that definitely felt like open heart surgery. It’s challenging to truly do the scope of these network upgrades justice, but I’d like to attempt to give this project a bit of perspective.

We spent months designing, planning, organizing, testing, and re-testing. Planning for any possible issues that might come up, because there’s no such thing as an undo button on a live production network. No amount of planning can make that open heart surgery any easier, It simply means you’re more aware of the difficulties that might arise, and are suitably prepared for them.

Although a datacenter network can range from modest all the way to the Googlesque, they can all be broken into 3 layers. The Serverbeach network upgrades touched every single layer in each data center. We completely upgraded the top two layers, essentially transplanting the heart and all supporting muscle and valves. On top of the transplant, we also reconfigured the whole bottom layer of the network, which would equate to making every vein and artery more efficient. In the end we succeeded in completely overhauling Serverbeach’s circulatory system.

For a little more directness on the scope of this project, here are some of the numbers that make up what the 5 person backbone network engineering team worked through:

Number of man-hours spent planning, coordinating, ordering, designing, meeting, preparing, decommissioning, documenting, diagramming: 1800
Number of man-hours spent in after hours change control windows: 300
Number of man-hours spent in after hours emergency change control windows: 18
Number of after hours Change controls performed: 16
Number of after hours Emergency Change controls performed: 1
Number of Kilometers/Miles flown: 33,800 / 21,000
Number of hours spent in airplanes: 55
Number of network devices reconfigured locally while sitting within the datacenter : 380
Number of hardware failures that occurred within Change Control windows: 6
To allude back to the original metaphor of comparing a network upgrade to open heart surgery, a successful surgery requires more than just a surgeon to be a success. Just like a surgeon is aided by a variety of resources, so too was the backbone network engineering team aided by an incredible variety of teams within Peer1. Without this level of coordination of efforts and awesome team work, these upgrades would not be possible.

Guest author Ben “Dr. Network” Kennedy is a hockey player, network engineer, and aspiring open heart surgeon who has developed a mild case of Stockholm syndrome ever since the 8 month network maintenance window has closed.

From vacuum tubes and that filled entire basements and required a math degree to program to 8.2 petaflops on demand in the cloud, computing has come a long way over the past 70 years. Our friends over at PEER 1 Hosting made an infographic

Being a Systems Administrator can be thankless work. They’re the ones who keep your data flowing, networks pinging and computers booting round the clock, and the cruel hallmark of a great Sysadmin is this:

If they’re doing a good job, you don’t even know they’re doing it.

So we haveSysAdmin Appreciation Day – an attempt to recognize the unsung heros of Information Technology. And while a single day of recognition and appreciation doesn’t really undo the countless hours of frustration that can come along with the job, it sure doesn’t hurt either.

Last month a team of Beachers traded in their geeky glasses for some super stylin’ shoes and headed down to the bowling alley to take part in the annual Bowl For Kids’ Sake Fundraiser.

The event is the largest annual fundraiser for Big Brothers and Big Sisters of South Texas, and very close to our own Alyssa Vargas‘ heart, as she was involved as a Big Sister back when she was in High School & College. She coordinated our participation in the event, and was thrilled to see that we were able to fill not one, not two but three teams to represent the SeverBeach family.

“Participating in the Bowl for Kids Sake fundraiser was a great experience” said Business Analyst Matt Valdes. “It’s always rewarding to help raise money for a good cause, especially one that helps children. To be able to play a game while doing it makes it a win-win situation!”

Congratulations go out to our Assistant Data Center Manager Brad Pearson for bowling the game of his life, knocking down a 7-10 split. Apparently our team was defeated during the hula hoop contest, but I hear guarantees of redemption being promised for next year.

I’ve also been told there’s video of IT Support Guru Jim Park and our very own Big Kahuna Dax Moreno dancing the YMCA circulating on Facebook, but this has yet to be confirmed by the author.

Special thanks goes out to all of our friends and families who supported our efforts. In total we were able to raise almost $2000, all of which will go toward making a positive, long-lasting impact on children in our community.

1. Jason enjoyed towel day by reading some Douglas Adams and playing some minecraft
2. Alex hangs out at work with his friend little Cthulhu
3. Jot shows off his customized Nintendo DS project
4. Jennifer is an indisputable Queen of the Geeks (check her full submission here)
5. Chris keeps a reminder from Marvin the paranoid android close at all times: Don’t Panic!

We had a lot of great entries to the contest, you can check out the rest of them here if you’d like, and let us know your favorites!

Winners will receive an awesome $100 credit atThinkGeek.com, and we will be sending a free copy of our Map of the Internetposter to all participants. If you submitted a photo please forward your address to me (sboten at serverbeach dot com) so I can get your poster on it’s way as soon as possible.

Thanks again to everyone who entered from all of us at ServerBeach – we definitely got a kick out of all your photos. Until next year – Stay Geeky!